Re: [linux-audio-dev] LADSPA proposal ...

New Message Reply About this list Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Other groups

Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] LADSPA proposal ...
From: Jack O'Quin (joq_AT_io.com)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 22:46:19 EEST


Fons Adriaensen <fons.adriaensen_AT_skynet.be> writes:

> On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 11:31:01AM -0500, Jack O'Quin wrote:
>
> > I'm having trouble figuring out Fons' original point here, though I'm
> > sure he has one. Simple and human readable are worthwhile goals, but
> > hard to reconcile.
>
> Strange.. I'd think these two would go hand in hand...
>
> Whit 'simple' and 'line by line' I mean
>
> - you read in a line with fgets()
> - look at the first word, a keyword that tells you all about the format
> of the line
> - use sscanf() to read the rest.

Ah. I thought you meant syntactic simplicity, not the ease of writing
an ad-hoc parser. I fully agree that the size of the library should
be moderate. But, I'm not much in favor of basing a language on
fgets() and sscanf(). Made-up languages like that are often
syntactically more complex than you might think. Try writing the BNF
if this is not clear.

> > Why rule out XML? It's one of the few widely-used language groups
> > that actually sorta meets both those requirements (*fairly* simple and
> > *somewhat* human-readable). ;-)
>
> *somewhat* if properly formatted and indented. And evven then it's
> bloated. XML was one of the reasons I gave up on Gnome. After having read
> the forests (a forest is a lot of trees) for weeks I still was unable
> to kill the file browser permanently.

I'm no great lover of XML, but at least its syntax is sufficiently
well-defined that it's easy to write a pretty-print script.

> > The other examples that readily come to mind are even worse. LISP
> > appeals to me as an alternative, but that's probably not what he
> > wants, either.
>
> LISP is quite nice actually, but you'd need a complete LISP engine to
> read it...

That wasn't really a serious suggestion. The libguile.so.12.3.0 file
on my system is over half a meg. Would all the LADSPA hosts be
willing to add that and whatever else it entails to their memory
footprint?

Libxml2 is even bigger, almost a meg. I wonder how many LADSPA hosts
already use it for some other reason? I see that ardour, jamin and
hydrogen do...

  $ ldd `which ardour` | grep xml
        libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2 (0x40297000)

-- 
  joq


New Message Reply About this list Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Other groups

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Fri May 14 2004 - 22:46:18 EEST